Abstract
Inspired by nature, tunable wettability has attracted a lot of attention in both academia and industry. Various methods of polymer surface tailoring have been studied to control the changes in wetting behavior. Polymers with a precisely controlled wetting behavior in a specific environment are blessed with a wealth of opportunities and potential applications exploitable in biomaterial engineering. Controlled wetting behavior can be obtained by combining surface chemistry and morphology. Plasma assisted polymer surface modification technique has played a significant part to control surface chemistry and morphology, thus improving the surface wetting properties of polymers in many applications. This review focuses on plasma polymerization and investigations regarding surface chemistry, surface wettability and coating kinetics, as well as coating stability. We begin with a brief overview of plasma polymerization; this includes growth mechanisms of plasma polymerization and influence of plasma parameters. Next, surface wettability and theoretical background structures and chemistry of superhydrophobic and superhydrophilic surfaces are discussed. In this review, a summary is made of recent work on tunable wettability by tailoring surface chemistry with physical appearance (i.e. substrate texture). The formation of smart polymer coatings, which adjust their surface wettability according to outside environment, including, pH, light, electric field and temperature, is also discussed. Finally, the applications of tunable wettability and pH responsiveness of polymer coatings in real life are addressed. This review should be of interest to plasma surface science communality particularly focused controlled wettability of smart polymer surfaces.
Highlights
Plasma Polymerization has been a vibrant area of research as it offers a versatile route to design materials rationally with tunable functionalities
The surface wettability is governed by surface chemistry and enhanced by surface roughness, rough and smooth solid surfaces are designed with different hydrophobic and surface roughness, rough and smooth solid surfaces are designed with different hydrophobic hydrophilic coatings to exhibit specific surface wettability
They observed reversiblytoswitchable narrow temperatures range of about 10 °C and a relatively wide range of pH about 10 due to wettability from superhydrophilic to superhydrophobic in response to both narrow temperatures range of about 10 ◦ C and a relatively wide range of pH about 10 due to combining effect of the chemical structure variation and the surface roughness
Summary
Plasma Polymerization has been a vibrant area of research as it offers a versatile route to design materials rationally with tunable functionalities. The exclusive properties of plasma polymer smart coatings like tunable wettability, self-cleaning and antireflective make them prominent in various applications such as biomaterials, drug delivery, adhesion, protective coatings, microelectronic devices, oil-water separation and thin film technology. These smart polymer coatings have attracted considerable interest owing to these remarkable application oriented surface properties, especially surface wettability [1,2,3,4]. The research background and mechanism of plasma copolymerization and copolymer surface properties, mainly tunable surface wettability, are presented as well
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